As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. An option is an Information Handling System (IHS). An IHS generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements may vary between different applications, IHSs may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in IHSs allow for IHSs to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, global communications, etc. In addition, IHSs may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Components of an IHS consume electrical power and can generate significant amounts of heat. Heat within an IHS may degrade the reliability and performance of various internal components of the IHS, possibly resulting in costly malfunctions and component failures. In order to ventilate heated air out of the IHS and away from internal components, an IHS may utilize a cooling fan, or a plurality of cooling fans organized within an airflow cooling system. As temperatures within the IHS increase, the cooling fans may be used to ventilate heated air from within the IHS, or from within certain internal compartments of the IHS. Certain IHSs may utilize a single cooling fan to ventilate heated air from within the IHS. Other IHSs may utilize complex airflow cooling systems that include one or more banks of cooling fans.
An IHS airflow cooling system may utilize an open-loop control or a closed-loop control system in order to determine fan speed settings for the one or more cooling fans that are available to the cooling system of the IHS. Closed-loop control systems typically utilize measured temperature information collected from temperature sensors located at various locations within the IHS. Based on the collected temperature information, a closed-loop control system may operate the cooling fans in order generate sufficient airflow cooling to maintain the temperatures of internal components at or below desired target values. Open-loop control systems, on the other hand, do not utilize sensor feedback and instead rely on preset fan speed configurations, such as a thermal table that specifies fan speed settings for various possible hardware configurations within the IHS.
Closed-loop thermal control systems provide the ability to precisely control fan speeds based on observed conditions within the IHS. As such, closed-loop control systems may both reduce unnecessary operation of the cooling fans, while still ensuring component temperature levels remain at or below a desired target value. However, the processing and network resources required for implementing sensor data collection mechanisms required for a closed-loop control system may adversely affect the performance of the IHS. For instance, sensor data collection mechanisms that rely on polling of temperature sensors may noticeably impact the operation of the component that is being monitored, such as latency in certain data storage operations resulting from the collection of temperature data from sensors provided by high-speed storage drives. Due to such performance impacts, certain cooling systems support disabling of temperature polling for certain components, such as for high-speed storage drives. Sensor failures, or other problems that prevent the collection of temperature information required in closed-loop control systems, may result in the cooling system of an IHS failing to respond to rising temperatures, which may cause overheating, and potentially damage, to components of the IHS. Such sensor failures may be detected by the cooling system, but fail-over operations by cooling systems typically involve setting the cooling fans to a safe, but unnecessarily high, fan speed setting. In certain IHSs, closed-loop control systems may be limited due to insufficient sensor data.
Due to such issues associated with closed-loop control systems, in certain scenarios open-loop control systems may be preferable. Open-loop control systems operate based on predefined fan speed settings that may be determined based on the hardware configuration of the IHS. As such, open-loop control systems may not be forward-compatible with new hardware configurations, and thus are limited to providing efficient cooling only for scenarios that are accounted for within thermal tables that provide the various predefined fan speed settings. In certain cases, any updates or changes to these thermal tables in order to account for changes in the hardware configuration of an IHS requires updating the firmware for a fan controller that implements the open-loop system.